1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an input system and an input method for an electronic device and more particularly, to a Chinese-phonetic-notation-based input system and a method thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
It is necessary for both of the computer systems and the consumptive electronic appliances to be equipped with the input devices for the user to input data or commands. In various types of input devices, the keyboard is widely used and is an input device with the highest acceptance rate. Each of the traditional physical keyboard and the virtual keyboard implemented by the software possesses a plurality keys which respectively correspond to different characters, so that, when the user presses one of the key, the character corresponding to the pressed key is input into the electronic device. As for the QWERTY keyboard, since the keys are one-on-one corresponding to the English alphabets, the number of the keys of the QWERTY keyboard is a lot. When the QWERTY keyboard is implemented as the virtual keyboard, huge amount of keys lead to inconvenient keyboard operation. For instance, it is inevitable to shrink down the dimension of the keyboard to avoid the screen space from being largely occupied by the virtual keyboard. Therefore, the displaying region allocating for each key is too small and the space between the keys is too narrow. Thus, it is highly possible for the user to mistakenly press the wrong key and the input efficiency cannot be improved. Furthermore, in order to solve the aforementioned problem, it is necessary to reasonably enlarge the displaying region of the virtual keyboard. When the virtual keyboard almost occupies half of the screen space, the operation frame viewed by the user is seriously affected.
Furthermore, in the operation of the Chinese based electronic device, the user is used to using the Chinese phonetic notation input method during the input operation. The major difference between inputting Chinese based on the Chinese phonetic notations and inputting English is that, while using the input method based on Chinese phonetic notations to input Chinese, the mapping relationship between the Chinese phonetic notations and the keys and the key arrangement directly affect the input efficiency. If the Chinese phonetic notations respectively correspond to the keys according to the order of the Chinese phonetic notations, it is easy to generate exceeding candidate characters during the input operation. Hence, the user needs to select a character from the candidate characters and the input efficiency is decreased.